The present invention relates to a fault inspection apparatus of a color, solid state image pickup element and, more particularly, to an inspection apparatus for the detection of color unevenness.
In general, color unevenness is one of the faults that can occur in color solid-state image pickup elements. These color unevenness faults the color of a fault portion either locally or over the entirety of the display, and are faults where there are slight color discrepancies (color differences or differences in the color density) between the colors of the entire image.
Conventionally, the determination of faulty or nonfaulty color unevenness depended upon human perception, and a visual test was performed by a test operator. This is described with reference to FIG. 1. In FIG. 1, a color solid-state image pickup element 72 that performs scanning is first mounted to a camera 73. Then, the image of a light source 71 is led to a monitor 74 via a color solid-state image pickup element 72 and the camera 73, and a test operator 75 visually compares the image of the monitor 74 with a reference sample and judges whether or not there is a fault.
Since an inspection for faults in color unevenness of color solid image elements by such visual determination is dependent upon the perception of the operator, there are discrepancies in the fault judgments because of individual variations. There are also discrepancies in judgment when the same test operator makes such judgments over an extended period of time.
Also, judging faults is performed by comparison of a reference sample image that the test operator has memorized and so it is necessary to have many weeks of training for the memory of this reference sample image. Because of this, there is the problem that much skill is required to inspect for color unevenness faults, and that the training of test operators is an important problem for manufacturing management.